


Mundanity

by nineofwords



Category: Neoscum (Podcast), Shadowrun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 13:55:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15909579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nineofwords/pseuds/nineofwords
Summary: Pandora's stuck in a box. I wonder what she's thinking about?





	Mundanity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The Neoscum Crew](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=The+Neoscum+Crew).



> CW: Mention of self-harm, brief contemplation of suicide

Time stood still. This wasn’t a quaint expression. Time literally stood still in the box. It was what it was designed for after all.

Pandora stared at the delicate, ornate, ceiling from her bed. The shapes there were all geometric, because heaven fucking forbid there be an image on there to capture her imagination. She rolled over and considered if she wanted to go back to sleep. Not that she needed to. Time didn’t pass in this room, not in a real sense. Nothing could be changed in it. She didn’t need to sleep any more than she needed to eat or bathe or piss or even breathe. But she did most of them anyway, because what else was she supposed to do to pass the non-existent time?

Her gaze fell across her prison. It was  _ immaculate _ . Perfect and gleaming and utterly totally seamless. No possible means of escape. What a barren hellscape.

The breathtaking jewel she was packaged in was all dark red fabrics, glittering marble, and deep rich wood. Embroidery and geometric engravings positively littered the room, despite her best efforts in the first few hours - days? She couldn’t be sure - of her captivity.

Decay did not exist in the room, nor did destruction. Almost as soon as she’d driven a steak knife into a wood carving, it had healed itself. She’d no sooner attempted to cut out a piece of embroidery when it sewed itself back together. It was all down to the incredibly powerful magics which existed in this terrarium, this microcosm which had become her existence. One of the most disconcerting aspects of the magic meant that every time she took a bite of food, it instantly reformed as soon as she pulled her teeth away. If that couldn’t put you off eating, she didn’t like to think about what would.

She sighed and rolled off the bed, thudding artlessly onto the floor. It hurt, but in a sort of half hearted, fleeting way that didn’t feel real. Besides, she knew she wouldn’t bruise. She knew because, in her darkest moments when destroying the room had had no effect, she’d turned on herself in a desperate attempt to make a mark on  _ something _ , to prove that she was still real, maybe even to goad someone into getting her out of the room. She’d tried everything: Hitting herself, cutting herself, even breaking bones. None of it took; her body instantly put itself back together as though nothing had happened. 

She had no impact on the world, and the world had no impact on her. She couldn’t even mark out a kind of artificial time, because no mark lasted in this godforsaken place. And of course,  _ he _ hadn’t even given her the dignity of a clock.

She lay curled on the floor and stared emptily at the space under the bed. He hadn’t given her the dignity of  _ anything _ . He’d put her in this box with the gestures of basic human decency, with all this elaborate expensive shit, but in the end that was all it was: A heaping, steaming pile of shit. And she was just a ghost who moved through it occasionally, pretending to fill her time to avoid the looming empty eternity of nothingness that stretched ahead of her.

She had no entertainment. No comm, no screens, no matrix access. Not even old-fashioned low-tech options, like books and CDs. There were no images of any kind, nothing which could distract or entertain her from the screaming void of her existence. She wanted to die, but she had no guarantee that death would be any different, and that was the most terrifying thought of all; she couldn’t bear the idea that her torture would last forever.

It wouldn’t, though. She had to believe that. She  _ had _ to. Somewhere out there, hopefully not too far away, her sister was coming for her. Her beautiful, strong, fast, funny, kind sister. The sister who had always stood up for her to their father, the sister who always knew how to cheer her up, the sister she’d shared endless sweets with. Her sister with the kind of endless energy to keep looking for a way to pop open the box to save her, her sister with the sheer physical strength to break down the goddamn walls around their father’s ears. If her sister could ever actually get her hands on their father, she could snap his neck like a twig.

If  _ Pandora  _ could ever actually get her hands on their father, she wouldn’t finish him off nearly that quickly.

She liked to think about what she’d do to her father when she got out. And she  _ would _ get out. She still had that hope, hope was something she would hold onto with her last dying breath. And even if her hope ever ran out, her trust in her sister wouldn’t. Surely Oracle couldn’t be far.

She rolled on the floor to face the other wall. But was it selfish to want her sister to come save her? Wouldn’t it be better, nobler even, if she wished her sister to stay as far away as possible? As far away from  _ him _ as possible? As far from the boxes as possible?

Yes. Yes it was nobler. But when you’re trapped in a box, unable to make any lasting marks, unable to convince yourself you’re real, driven to the kind of madness that makes trying to break your own arm seem like a reasonable decision, nobility tended to take something of a backseat. Things like selfishness, hatred, and desperation were much better as coping mechanisms. She could live with being selfish and petty if it meant she could hold onto the belief that she could get out.

Idly, to cheer herself up from that depressing line of thought, she started wondering what her sister was doing at exactly that moment. Was she just now waking up? Was she eating? Was she braiding someone’s hair, as she used to do for Pandora when they were small? With nothing else to do and nothing to distract her, Pandora began to imagine countless small and incredibly detailed mundane moments her sister could be engaging in at that exact moment. She imagined her sister at various ages, not knowing how much time had truly passed in the outside world. Was it a month? A year? Ten years? She had no way of knowing.

When she ran out of peaceful, domestic scenes to put Oracle in, she began passing time in the only other ways she knew how: She sang and danced and recited poetry she’d been made to memorize in school. She did increasingly intricate mental maths. She told herself the stories she remembered from her childhood.

And, as always, she saved the best for last: She pictured all the ways she wanted to make the shitstain who had put her in this box suffer. No discomfort was too good or too small for that man. She imagined every conceivable torture, every painful illness, every horrific, screaming, agonizing death she’d ever heard of or could imagine (and endless practice had given her an excess of imagination). All of them, she would find a way to enact in the world outside this box as soon as she got out. And she would get out. She had no doubts about that.

Pandora  _ would  _ get out of the box. And once she did? Well. Who could imagine the hell she would rain down then?


End file.
